1. Field
The present disclosure relates to a ray tracing apparatus and method.
2. Description of Related Art
Three-dimensional (3D) rendering refers to image processing for synthesizing 3D object data into an image viewed from a given view point of a camera.
Examples of rendering approaches include a rasterization approach and a ray tracing approach. The rasterization approach generates an image while projecting 3D objects onto a screen. The ray tracing approach generates an image by tracing a path of incident light along which a ray is emitted from a view point of a camera to each pixel of the image.
When the ray tracing approach is used, a high-quality image may be generated by reflecting physical properties of light (reflection, refraction, transmission, etc.) in a rendering result, but an amount of computation is relatively large, thus making it difficult to perform rendering at a high speed.
In the ray tracing approach, generating an acceleration structure (hereinafter, referred to as “AS”) by spatially splitting or dividing a scene object to be rendered, traversing the AS (hereinafter, referred to as “TRV”), and conducting an intersection test (hereinafter, referred to as “IST”) between a ray and one or more primitive portions for each object typically requires a large amount of computation resources (such as processing time, bandwidth, memory, and the like).